Hoax Museum Blog: Photos

The Naked Chef —Here's a picture of the 2004 calendar of Jamie Oliver (aka The Naked Chef). Note the suggestively placed piece of bread. This image originally appeared on the website of Boots, which is a British pharmacy. And it quickly attracted attention, at which point Boots cropped the image in order to remove the offending piece of bread. I can't find another picture of the calendar anywhere online to compare this picture to, but I'm assuming that the piece of bread must have been photoshopped in.…

Lucky —Here's another image from the San Diego fires that seems to be too amazing to be real, but is actually totally genuine. It's circulating around with the caption 'lucky bastard' (enlarge it to see why this makes perfect sense). It was sent to me by Kentaro Mori of Liquito. I think that the photo was taken in the Scripps Ranch neighborhood of San Diego, though I could be wrong about that. According to the navy website which the picture comes from, the photo was taken from a Sea King…

Is The Blood Red Water Real? —An environmental activism group named Sea Shepherd photographed and videotaped Japanese fishermen slaughtering sixty dolphins in a cove near Taiji, Japan. They posted the pictures of the slaughter on their website, thereby causing widespread outcry. But one of the pictures is also provoking debate of a different kind. It shows the water of the cove turned an almost neon red color because of the blood of the dolphins. People looking at this are wondering, can that possibly be real? Can…

Fire Scene — Here's a very cool picture of one of the San Diego fires. For a second I actually thought it was fake because it seemed weird that traffic was heading right into the fire. Plus the time stamp looked odd (it's stamped October 28, even though the picture was posted on the 27th, and the woman who posted it says it was taken on the 26th... maybe their camera has the wrong date). I thought maybe someone had pasted the bottom scene of the traffic together with the top scene of the smoke. But…

Plane Meets Truck — I received this image from 'Detective Kid' who wants to know if it's real or fake. I've been checking it out and can't see anything obviously fake about it. The picture has a watermark on it, that I can't read. It's something like 'erzool.com.' If anyone knows anything about the picture, let me know.
UPDATE: A solution to this photo comes from Jeffrey Schuh: "This photo is a national geographic photograph. The photo has been republished in 'The Photographs' coffee table book. (The…

Hurricane Isabel? —
A photo described as a tanker approaching Hurricane Isabel at sea has been spreading around though email. And I have to admit, I've contributed to its spread, forwarding it on to friends and family. But David Emery informs us that it's a hoax. Well, the picture itself is real. But it doesn't show Hurricane Isabel. Instead, it shows a tanker approaching Tropical Cyclone Graham. But whether it's Isabel or Graham, it's still a really cool photo.

Indian Ghost Hoax —
A newspaper in the Indian city of Tiruchirappalli published a picture of a boy with an eerie ghost hovering behind him. They claimed the boy had encountered the ghost while on a school picnic, and went into a coma. Now the ghost was stalking other boys. As a result, families throughout the region started keeping their kids home, out of school. The photo, of course, was a photoshopped fake. More details here.

Playing Chicken with a Bus —
Here's a suspicious bit of video forwarded by Mara (who should get a prize for finding this kind of stuff). It shows a young man ducking to the ground as a bus rushes over him. Personally I think he's not actually under the bus. He's on the opposite side of the bus.

They Captured ET —
Talk about a pain in the neck. Photoshop has made this guy look a bit like a giraffe, or E.T.
This photo has been circulating via email for a few months. It's usually titled 'They finally captured E.T." or some variation of that. I think it's fair to conclude that the neck and stomach of the man being led away by the police officer have been digitally enlarged. Note the boxy pixellation where the photoshopper cut-and-pasted to lengthen the neck:
(thanks to Karen Robinson for sending this).

Too Skinny? —Here are some images that have been circulating around of anorexically skinny fashion models. Are these models actually this skinny, or have the images been touched up by someone trying to make the fashion industry look like a gallery of horrors? I'm not sure. (Warning: one of the images may not be considered safe for work, though it's no racier than what you'd find in your average issue of National Geographic).